


His Father's Son

by ablindromance



Category: Castlevania (Animated Series), Castlevania (Cartoon), 悪魔城ドラキュラ | Castlevania Series
Genre: Animated Series, Blood, Blood Drinking, Canonical Character Death, Castlevania Season 3 Spoilers, Gore, Grief/Mourning, netflix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-23
Updated: 2020-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:54:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24338452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ablindromance/pseuds/ablindromance
Summary: What is the color of grief?
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	His Father's Son

He walked as a phantom in the great halls of this weary castle. Not a sound he made as one bare foot mechanically fell before the other. They were taking him to a place even he didn’t know. All he was sure of was that he needed to move as all tortured and forgotten souls needed to move. Other ghosts trapped in his memories followed him in the silence, and he could have sworn he saw them walk beside him. 

He did not fear them. The most dangerous creature stalking the night was him, and predators rarely feared prey. In fact, his dose of fear just moments ago drained from his veins and out through the tips of his fingers and toes. As it flowed through his body and left wet footprints on the thick carpet in his passing, it burned the fresh wounds in his skin. The needle that injected that terror for his life was a strong, blessed wire that mercilessly coiled around his body like a serpent. Holy, vengeful, and unforgiving of his vampiric blood, it bit into his flesh and burned him-- crucified him to his bed and _made_ him fear. It humiliated him, and he still carried that potent feeling with him along with the red-splattered sheet draped around his shoulders. 

Despite his torture, Alucard was still beautiful. Bearing marks of passion and brutalization side by side, his alabaster skin still beckoned to be touched. His svelte figure cut fine lines in the moonlight and moved gracefully in the sun. He commanded the eye with no effort, and charisma poured from him in waves. Bright wolfish eyes shielded his vast knowledge with mystery, and his thick tresses were a river of gold that flowed down his back and the strong ridges of his shoulders. A blood-stained messiah, naked and glorious and suffering, he walked alone. 

Loneliness was his companion; the entity that embraced his heart the moment-- or month, or year-- that Sypha and Trevor left him as guardian of the Belmont estate and this spectral castle. She was quiet for a while, gradually collecting her strength from sleepless nights that dragged too long, and thoughts that lingered on those two troublesome, wonderful humans that left him, and dinners at an empty table, and full days in which Alucard hadn’t spoken once because there was no one to speak to. She was corporeal now, and she took him by the hand and whispered maddeningly into his ear _’You are so alone.’_. Instinct told him where to escape her, if only for a while.

Alucard entered his childhood bedroom for the first time since his father’s slaying, and a blue cold gripped the room from the broken window on the wall. This entire wing of the castle, and this room especially, had been kept sacred and pristine, protected. Though Dracula was driven mad by his grief, he still held on to a piece of what he lost-- his sweet boy’s room where none could enter. This room was Alucard’s last sanctuary, and Loneliness lingered in the shattered entrance until she found a way to slither in. The luxurious sheet dragged on the ground and turned grey as the young dhampir paced over the ornate and singed rug that still bore his father’s ashes. Lowering himself onto the site of his greatest sin, cushioned by his guilt, he lay next to them and curled in on himself. Physically an adult, it would have been impossible-- immature, even-- to curl onto his father’s chest as he did as a child, but he saw himself there now. And behind him, from a family portrait on the wall, his mother’s loving eyes looked gently down at him and brought him comfort. He needed to be embraced by their love; made to feel protected by the remnants of their earthly presence. It was between black marks on the wooden floor and an image in a golden frame that he envisioned his parents’ arms around him, shielding him from loneliness at the door and the ache in his chest. His own slender arms wrapped about himself to make it feel a little more real, and he stared into nothingness. Heartbreak must have found a divide in the reopened scar on his chest, and it suddenly spilled its warm essence all over him. 

“...I never lied to you,” he confessed, voice coarse and shaken.

He spoke to them all, the ghosts. He referred to the promises he made. To his mother, Lisa, he promised to not let Dracula destroy the world she loved in his mourning of her loss. To his father, Dracula-- no, _Vlad_ , he promised to cease his hand before he destroyed himself and everything he ever knew. To Sumi and Taka, he promised tutelage and wisdom and kindness.

He never lied. 

He tried to be different and good. 

He tried to be, in some small part, a little warmer and a little more human. 

Sorrow blanketed him, and Alucard cried long and hard into the night. 

~

The rays of sunrise crept through his window but offered little warmth. Mornings grew chilly and would soon usher in a proper winter, but there were still a few fall days lingering about. The soft glow drove Loneliness away from his room, made her grow small, but it also brought with it a new feeling. An anger, fiery like the leaves clinging to tree branches in the forest, settled in Alucard’s stomach. Black coals of bitterness were its fuel. He was tired and empty, and his body was the furnace to house those flames. For a long while he lay still, listening to the moderate beat of his heart and confirming that he had not successfully willed himself to die. Gradually he became more aware of his limbs and how much of himself still hurt. His skin was perfumed with the scent of sex and saliva and blood. His muscles ached, and the pink meat of him was sore at points of penetration and points where he was penetrated. The pearlescent innocence of Adrian Țepeș, that gentle, hopeful, loving little boy, was given away in a moment of trust and he was put to slaughter like a lamb. 

In his eagerness to accept love in whatever form it came, regardless of gender or race or age or culture or anything else different from what he knew, he’d sacrificed himself and his humanity. Adrian died last night beside those two eastern beauties. But Alucard? Alucard still lived because Alucard was strong.

The weight of the evening hung under each of his aureolin eyes as he narrowed them and pushed himself up. _No more_ , he thought to himself. Now standing and reclaiming control of his body, he brushed the dried ash from his cheeks with the back of his hand, the gesture itself smearing rather than wiping away. It didn’t matter. He collected the sheet around his hips and looked over his shoulder at the portrait of his mother. 

That blessed, compassionate soul. As beautiful on canvas as she was in life, selfless and forgiving, he quietly thanked her with the fragmented pieces of his heart for watching over him in the night. He’d opened his lips to speak, to apologize for letting her gift of empathy and connection to humanity die. But his tongue was weak and could not find the words. If she still loved him, perhaps she could still forgive him, too.

With purposeful steps, he paced the brightened corridors back to what was his bedchamber, back to the betraying corpses that waited patiently for him. The lean and tan bodies folded backward, bent into macabre pieces of art that Alucard appreciated because he loved them-- both of them. _Loved_ , he thought emphatically. That feeling was a wretched thing of the past. _Adrian_ could have understood their pain and empathized with their plight; he _did_. Now, they were just predators who bared their fangs and struck first, but lacked the strength to achieve the kill. The laws of nature were cruel like that. Humans were cruel like that. 

Alucard didn’t look at them as he dressed himself in slacks and his stained nightgown, its ends tucked carelessly into his waistband. His back was turned to them still when he called his sword to his hand and ceremoniously wiped the silver blade clean onto his discarded bedsheet. Sharply glinting in reverent obedience to its master, the deadly sword was carefully sheathed into its scabbard and willed to settle upon two hooks high on the wall. Finally he turned and looked upon the two youthful faces shrouded by a torn piece of his canopy. In his mind, Adrian whispered that they didn’t deserve this, but his voice was growing more and more faint. _Clearly you’ve forgotten that you are dead, too. Did -you- deserve it?_ Alucard snarled back. 

Adrian didn’t answer. 

Alucard’s face hardened and twisted up in a sneer. How dare he lament another when he was taken for granted? Nearly perishing for such a base emotion as kindness? _Asinine_ , he told himself. No one was-- or ever would be-- worthy of that again. Lithe fingers dragged through the pools of blood that were gradually oxidizing into auburn at their edges. He rolled the dark liquid between them and hated it as he did the siblings that marinated in it. Not since he slept under Gresit did he think to ingest this life-giving fluid. For him, it was an alternative, almost like a vitamin, that he only consumed to heal grievous wounds. He didn’t possess the thirst that full-blooded vampires did, and yet in the seconds that ticked by, he felt more and more drawn to the mark of his father. The twins had taken enough from him. Why not take this and reclaim a little of all he had given to them? 

His fingers went to his mouth and he sucked the dark wetness from them. The flavor was cold and metallic as he expected it to be. As it coated his tongue and slid down his throat, he felt a sense of relief disperse through him like powdered medicine in water, or tea leaves in the porcelain cups he poured for these traitorous dead children. The sample numbed the burn of his coiling wounds. The last time he bared his fangs in a threat was at that piece of shit Belmont, but now was a fine time, too. The fire in his belly flared and he hissed, lips curling back as he bit down into Sumi’s severed pulse point. Feeling his fangs sink into the stump of her neck was exhilarating and foreign. Partial instinct and partial spite drove him to suck a mouthful from the stilled veins. He swallowed heartily. But not too much, he remembered. Stale, dead blood was poison; such was written in many a book of vampiric accounts. Alucard raised slowly, and leaned to do the same at Taka’s muscular throat. Claiming a single mouthful of him in that satisfying puncture of teeth to flesh, Alucard lifted and felt just a little stronger. He needed to be to go about the work of moving the bodies. 

It was a nasty work. He went about it without a single thought to the gruesome nature of the task. One swaddled body at a time, he carried each outside to the front of the castle and laid them down like precious dolls. Navigating the post-battle perils of the castle’s great hall, Alucard plucked two thick beams of wood and settled upon the entrance steps to whittle an end of each into a crude point. This, too, was a mindless task. As a child, he spent much of his time studying, learning skills, and, at times, playing vigorous rounds of hide-and-seek with his parents. Those days were happy enough, but other children were never really allowed to play with him. The townsfolk feared his little family, forbidding their children to ever approach the castle. In the instances when he accompanied his mother into town to treat the sick, the more curious and brave children defied their parents and stole away for a game of skipping rocks at the river or games of tag with him. They’d always be snatched away if they were caught, and he would return to his mother’s side, discouraged but smiling. Well, with a trained, tight-lipped sort of smile for the concealment of his teeth. 

_Poor little Adrian_ , he mocked as he watched a wood shaving curl from the final stroke of his knife and fall between his feet. _It took children to make you abandon all hope. How ironic, when only children hold on to it so tightly._

He seethed when he stood over the bodies. Sumi first. _Ladies_ first, because he was raised to be a gentleman that followed decorum. Into the naval, through the diaphragm, behind the small and large intestine, follow the spine, into the chest cavity, past the clavicle bones, into the larynx, out through the mouth. He didn’t flinch at the squelch of ruptured intestines and scraped bone as the stake drove through her body. A dark part of him got a bit of satisfaction from it. Instead of playing games and enjoying a carefree youth like normal little ones, he confined himself away to develop his speedily-maturing intellect with the books of magic, medicine, and the human body. How he longed to be “normal” rather than stuck between two grey, dreary worlds in which neither fully accepted him.

 _Abandon hope for that._

With a heft, he stabbed the free end of the stake into the ground and drilled it deep with his Hellish strength.

Now, Taka. He took a bit more effort as he was heavier and his bones were dense. Alucard recognized that his and his sister’s childhood was less than stellar, too. Their terror of nightly murders by Cho earned his sympathy before this. Some of that sympathy might have remained, but it was a distant memory he could no longer access. Alucard thought them both foolish because they were blinded by distrust; they still had each other despite all their trials. They even had him, for a short while. 

That reminded him of the two other fools he knew: the clever speaker who tongue-lashed him and knew too many alternative words for the same fucking word, and was not afraid to let him know how intelligent she was, and the rude, unsavory drunkard who didn’t know when to quit, or when to die, or when to shut the fuck up. Even they had found each other long ago, when the three of them were trapped in the Belmont Hold. Both humans, who certainly had each other in more ways than one by now. 

_How fucking quaint._

Bitterness stoked his rage and he hoisted Taka’s body up with so much force that it inadvertently slid a few inches lower onto the stake. Humans were worthless. The best of them died with his mother; the rest didn’t deserve to live. 

And yet, they still did. Taking, ruining, persecuting, murdering, and somehow still able to discover love among their blasphemous, hypocritical, selfish selves. They didn’t deserve love. They didn’t even deserve mercy.

His last act of decency was to dress the corpses and cover their shame; the crows would soon come to peck out their eyes and the insects to feast on the rest. He returned inside the castle to collect and burn his bloody bedding, and launder what could be salvaged until midday. In the late afternoon he went out as normal, basket upon his arm, into the forest to hunt for this evening’s meal. Fish again, he supposed. Eating now was more out of novelty than necessity.

When he returned just before dusk, his basket felt heavier. It wasn’t the fish. It wasn’t the onions or herbs or potatoes. It was the realization that his father’s intent for humanity would have been better. 

They deserved to rot.

_Abandon all hope for them._

As he came upon the broad grounds of the castle, he spoke for the first time that day. 

“Well. I suppose I could’ve put up big signs all over the place.” His voice was tight, his face hard and stern. “Do not enter. Danger of death. Abandon all hope.” A scoff. 

“That sort of thing.” As he passed between the impaled bodies of Taka and Sumi, he did not so much as give them a backward glance. They were now a part of the castle; flesh-and-bone banners flanking the wide stairs at the east and west to ward off any more visitors. The wind howled around them. 

“But this seemed to work well enough... for dead old dad.”

The heavy doors of the castle slammed shut behind him, echoing the sealed doors of his heart. None would be let into either again.

**Author's Note:**

> The characters in this work are exclusively the property of their original creators and Netflix. I do not own them.
> 
> If you've gotten this far, thank you immensely for reading!  
> The alternative title for this work was supposed to be "The Color of Grief" because of the usage of colors throughout it. In addition, the ending of this piece and Alucard's monologue was plucked straight from the end of season 3 because I loved the heartbreaking way it ended. I did, however, want to explore his state of mind, his thoughts, his feelings, and what might have transpired off-screen during Sypha's and Trevor's battle. Tadaa! I did so. This poor soul forever has my heart.


End file.
